Well for my first blog I thought I’d start with a contentious issue – Call of Duty 4 Mapping !
The CoD Community has always benefitted from the dedicated individuals willing to make new maps for gamers to play. Way back (as it seems now) at the start of the year the tools were released for CoD4 and immediately there were protests. The beta release to the selected few had been leaked and wasn’t working for many; the official release came out but there were many new mappers eager to get started who didn’t have a clue what to do (and the Wiki wasn’t ready), and, those old time CoDders (like myself) wanted all the old maps reworked for Call of Duty 4.
The eagerness of the new mapping army quickly turned to frustration when it was found that many of the new maps were bug-ridden, not properly tested, had files incorrectly constructed and wouldn’t work with a lot of the mods (such as AWE) giving nasty red screens. Then there was the competition.
Great ! cried all the mappers, eagerly rushing to complete their maps for the 31st March deadline. The customer face of Infinity Ward – known as “fourzerotwo†– promised “special prizing and opportunities†and there was a plethora of map releases especially right up to the deadline ……. which then came and went and no news from Infinity Ward.
Days went by into April and then …… an announcement ! A Map Pack, downloadable for … XBOX owners ! Uproar followed until finally on 23rd April Infinity Ward announced – A Mapping Contest ! So what had happened to the original contest ? Well, forgotten apparently. The new contest has just provoked even more uproar as it is divided amongst countries, some of which (like Ireland) apparently can’t even enter the competition. There is so much legal jargon in the T&C’s that mappers don’t even understand what they’re signing up to and a great debate on who actually owns a map that has been developed with tools provided by Infinity Ward.
And yet XBOX owners are happily downloading their extra content (for which they pay) which is producing millions of dollars in revenue and PS3 versions are on the way.
Now given that there are still new maps being made for vanilla CoD, CoD UO and CoD2, now several years after these games were released, you really would think the makers would show a bit more interest in the PC gamers and mappers wouldn’t you ? Oh well, that’s just big business I suppose. Us poor old PC gamers really can’t compete when it comes to consoles can we ? The fact that there’s in excess of 12,000 Call of Duty 4 server for the PC gamers obviously counts for nothing and the likes of INX are wasting their time offering us nice gameservers to play on.
Still, as long as I can still play on a Pavlov map, who cares ? Oh, and the latest competition ? No-one knows the end date so I guess the mappers will be making maps for ever !
- Darkstar
Good article. There are such a lot of really talented mappers out there and having a solid modding community really does boost sales, as the makers of Unreal Tournament III know only too well.
It’s a bit of a farce really. The end loser is always the host, because we have to deal with the plethora of customers complaining their servers with dozens of buggy custom maps are “mysteriously” crashing